Jeff Sessions announced it as the country recovers from a mass shooting and natural disasters.

Just days after major natural disasters and a deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas, BuzzFeed News reports that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has reversed a federal government policy that protected transgender people in the workplace under a 1964 civil rights law.

“Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination encompasses discrimination between men and women but does not encompass discrimination based on gender identity per se, including transgender status,” reads Sessions’s directive, which BuzzFeed News obtained. “Although federal law, including Title VII, provides various protections to transgender individuals, Title VII does not prohibit discrimination based on gender identity per se. This is a conclusion of law, not policy. As a law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice must interpret Title VII as written by Congress.”

As BuzzFeed News highlights, Sessions’s directive also includes a particularly disturbing sentiment: that this will be the government’s position in the present and future under the Trump administration. “The Department of Justice will take that position in all pending and future matters (except where controlling lower-court precedent dictates otherwise, in which event the issue should be preserved for potential future review),” Sessions writes.

Sharon McGowan, former lawyer in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and attorney for LGBT group Lambda Legal, told BuzzFeed News that Sessions’s “law, not policy” theory is “ironic” due to the fact that it’s ignoring the developments federal courts have made over the last several years.

“The memo is devoid of discussion of the way case law has been developing in this area for the last few years,” she said. “It demonstrates that this memo is not actually a reflection of the law as it is — it’s a reflection of what the DOJ wishes the law were.”

McGowan added that the Department of Justice is effectively “trying to roll back the clock and pretend that the progress of the last decade hasn’t happened.”

As BuzzFeed News highlights, the contention is “how broadly the government interprets” the 1964 act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and does not specifically denote LGBTQ rights; in other words, it’s an argument of semantics. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and various federal courts have determined sex discrimination does, indeed, include gender identity and, therefore, transgender rights.

”I have determined that the best reading of Title VII’s prohibition of sex discrimination is that it encompasses discrimination based on gender identity, including transgender status. The most straightforward reading of Title VII is that discrimination ‘because of...sex’ includes discrimination because an employee’s gender identification is as a member of a particular sex, or because the employee is transitioning, or has transitioned, to another sex,” Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder wrote in 2014, CNN reports.

“The memo is so weak and that analysis is so thin, that courts will recognize it for what it is — a raw political document and not sound legal analysis that should be given any weight by them,” McGowan said, according to BuzzFeed.